Page 66 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

powerful and governed by an absolute monarch, quality also comes to the fore in the art of Owo, Kongo. At that time it occupied roughly the
the Oba, supported by a court aristocracy and the Yoruba city-state located midway between strip running from the Atlantic to the Kwango
an efficient bureaucracy. Artists and craftsmen, Ife and Benin. Owo sculpture, as Frank Willett River, bordered on the north by what is now
such as the metal casters and ivory carvers, has shown, has points of contact with that of the Gabon and on the south by the course of the
were organized into guilds and worked exclu- two other capitals and shows the influence of Kwanza. This area was inhabited chiefly by
sively for the king, living in separate neighbor- both their cultures. Bantu populations of the Kongo group. At the
hoods set aside for them. It was only with the excavations conducted by close of the fifteenth century much of the king-
Despite the transformations that came inevi- Ekpo Eyo between 1969 and 1971 that the terra- dom, divided into provinces, was directly gov-
tably through contact with the Europeans, this cottas of Owo were brought to light. 21 Although erned by the Manicongo, the king of Kongo,
system of organization lasted until 1897, when the works are still being studied, they have through a hierarchy of chiefs and subchiefs,
Benin City was occupied, sacked and destroyed already shown their importance not only as while a few vassal states flanking the kingdom
by a British punitive expedition sent to avenge major documentary materials of Owo culture were in the process of removing themselves
the death of an English consul who had been but also as works of art of an intense expressive- from domination by the Manicongo or were
murdered, with his escort, en route from the ness. Dating obtained through thermoluminesc- striving to do so. The king kept a firm grip on
coast to the capital for a visit to the Oba. It ence tests indicates the fifteenth century as the the wealth of the country, on the activity of the
must be remembered, however, that the ruler period of manufacture. mines and on commerce. He collected tribute
had at the time been absorbed with ceremonies from his subjects, and he was served by a mone-
in honor of his ancestors, which rendered him tary system, judged functional by the first
unapproachable to foreigners, and he had expli- European chronicles, which was based on a par-
citly forbidden the visit. Kongo ticular type of shell over whose gathering, on
The booty from Benin, comprising thousands At about the time the Portuguese arrived in the island of Luanda, he held the monopoly. 22
of works of art, was for the most part put up for Benin they also established contact with Between 1482 and 1488 Diogo Cao carried
sale in London in order to recover the costs of another great African state, the kingdom of the out three voyages into the region. On his
the expedition, and most of it found its way into
the major museums of Europe. There were
sculptures in ivory and terra-cotta but chiefly in
brass, both figures in the round and plaques in
relief that had decorated the pillars of the inner
courts in the royal residence. The unexpected
arrival of so many works of art of exceptional
formal and technical quality (the works from Ife
and Mali were not yet known) made an enor-
mous impression in European cultural circles.
According to one oral tradition, the technique
of metal casting was introduced into Benin by
masters from Ife toward the end of the four-
teenth century. Whatever its origin may have
been, no other African artistic production is as
well known as that of Benin; hundreds of stud-
ies have been devoted to it. William Fagg, the
eminent specialist in Nigerian art, has divided
the art of Benin into three broad periods. The
first period is typified by the commemorative
heads, which reveal a degree of naturalism
which may have been derived from Ife art, and
is thought to have extended from the end of the
fourteenth century to the middle of the six-
teenth. The production of the middle period,
from the mid-sixteenth century to the end of
the seventeenth, includes the cast plaques,
which often contain figures of Portuguese. The
late period, marked by an increasing decline, ran
from the eighteenth century until the sack of
Benin in 1897. Scholars have debated the chro-
nology of the Benin sculpture at great length,
without any consensus having yet emerged. 20
The art of Benin is a court art, whose prin-
cipal aim is the glorification of the ruler. For all fig. 2. Crowned Head of an Oni from Wunmonije Compound, Ife, Nigeria, Yoruba
its extraordinary formal perfection, it lacks the peoples. I2th-i5th century, zinc brass. Museum of the Ife Antiquities, Ife.
moving humanity of the art of Ife. That human

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